Without interesting stories to tell, it all feels like an empty-calorie exercise in vapid songcraft.

More a novelty than an essential addition to the Dismemberment Plan legacy.

With all due respect to Mr. Albini, perhaps it’s time Nastasia broadened her collaborative horizons.

It's hard not to like music this well-ordered and composed, but in the end it sounds as if The Album Leaf has taken a break on innovation and is settling for being derivative -- of itself.

Too many of the tracks on Some Devil simply take longer than needed (five minutes on average) to reach their conclusion, most running out of gas somewhere around the three-and-a-half minute mark.

A grab-bag assemblage that simply doesn’t flow together very well.

Human Conditions suggests that Ashcroft has forgotten how to rock, choosing to indulge what appears to be a messiah complex.

Cold Roses’ first set is by-the-numbers, brokenhearted MOR fare, sometimes maudlin (“When Will You Come Back Home?”), infrequently dramatic (the piano-driven “How Do You Keep Love Alive”) and mostly forgettable. The second disc redeems Cold Roses from an even-less-enthusiastic recommendation.

One would like to think there's a subversive statement here about the blandness of much of commercial radio, but it's far more likely that the vocal turns by Dave Matthews and Bush's Gavin Rossdale are as free of intended irony as those songs' lyrics are free of fresh content.

The Beatles don't meet Jay-Z as equals; they're sliced and diced, the innate musicality of their work all but compromised into nothingness, into vaguely familiar square pegs crammed into the comparatively round holes of Jay-Z's original vocals.

Razorlight is more than The Strokes, London Bureau -- all nervous guitar lines and neither-here-nor-there bar-hopping energy -- but what's left of the mucho-hyped UK outfit's identity feels second-hand borrowed, as well.

Rehearsing My Choir is too self-consciously hip to be a twilight reflection on things past and is filled with personal asides only blood relatives can relate to.

Its sporadic pockets of accessibility aside, it's difficult to listen to Around the Sun without hearing it as a holding pattern, or worse, a piece of product released simply to keep the R.E.M. brand out among the public.

The most frustrating aspect of Idlewild is its lack of energy.

Now, this wouldn't seem so bad, or filler-friendly, if !!! offered an advancement on "Giuliani." Alas, no.

This stylistic-tryout grab-bag exposes a quartet that has yet to find a voice solely its own.

When he strikes the right balance of mischievous charm, rapid-fire wit and genial bravado, Ludacris proves why he's at the top of his game. But Chicken -N- Beer too often flashes us threatening glimpses of a less-likable persona behind that avuncular veneer.

For better or worse, RJD2’s talent is beat-making. While it’s easy to applaud him for following his dreams, we can’t give him extra marks for his output.

The pair overextend themselves often enough to appear to be posturing, costing them some of their charm.

Fans of the Scottish foursome will be disappointed with 12 Memories, which plays like a wimpy, distant cousin to Good Feeling.

By the halfway point, it becomes too easy to zone out and for the music to fade into the background.

Ultimately, they don't come across as unbearably pretentious so much as just really, really misguided.

Even if you slipped the album into your player without the slightest preconceived notion of who Courtney Love is or was, Sweetheart wouldn't be able to help but strike you as a document of sheer desperation, of a frantic need for approval. Worse, it's the audible sound of a talent in serious decline.

As with Carrabba's earlier work, though, the problem with A Mark is the utter lack of personalized context in which his heart-on-your-sleeve songs operate.

Lacking its predecessor's edgy tone, Life For Rent offers up one bland, polite tune after another.

Coming from a group whose debut offered a glimmer of hope for the expansion of the genre's boundaries, such creative laziness is all the more disappointing.

The album dies far more often than it flies, mistaking a crazy-quilt musical approach for creativity, and wrongly miscalculating the strengths of its anemic vocalist.

Even by the standards of Black's previous Catholics and solo offerings, Show Me Your Tears is a disappointment.